Note: This is a post that contains affiliate links.
As a small business owner growing your community of loyal clients means everything to your success within your industry. Building relationships through superb customer service and over-delivering on your promises help you stand out amongst your competitors. As a brick and mortar business owner, you already have a solid understanding of how you must pivot to reach your monthly goals, whether it’s for increasing sales, signing new clients, upselling new packages, etc. These are only some of the metrics that are used to measure your efforts and the success it brings. Social media is no different. Your main focus with social media is understanding how engaging your content is through tracking your social media analytics.
Growing your business online gives businesses small or large an added advantage to grow their community that much larger. Small business owners spend much of their precious time and energy and money to have someone curate content and engage with their followers within their community platforms online such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. With so much effort going into creating the perfect profile, aren’t you be curious to see if you are reaching the right audience? Tracking and reviewing your social media analytics is a way to understand how your online profiles are performing.
Why Tracking Your Analytics is Important
You cannot expect that your ideal client will trickle down through the sea of others because you are creating exceptional content. If you are a business that is trying to grow your leads through social media then is it necessary to analyze your efforts. Tracking social media analytics is essential to determine which of your content pieces are working in your favor and which are not. It also enables you to track your progress throughout a given period, which ultimately saves you time and keeps you on a path to success. These reports are meant to be reviewed monthly to not waste your efforts in a particular area for very long. If you are just starting out on social media, give yourself a few months to build some data before adjusting your parameters. Always remember to make subtle changes at a time and record what you have changed to reference at a later time.
Content is very important as we know and so in engagement. Analytics is your way to determine which piece of content has resonated with a particular group of individuals. How many likes did your post acquire? How many new followers did you get? Any leads click through on your links to your website? Does the time of day matter achieve the highest engagement? Some programs can show you exactly which platform and link a user came from. You can find the answers to all of your questions through analytic reports. It also allows for you to track ROI from some of your social media platforms.
All online platforms can be tracked for its performance. Without analytic reporting, it’s very hard to convince someone that having an online presence is pertinent to their business’ growth and increasing their bottom line. Let’s discuss three of the top key analytics to keep an eye on for social media.
Without analytic reporting, it’s very hard to convince someone that having an online presence is pertinent to their business’ growth and increasing their bottom line.Click To Tweet3 Key Analytics: Engagement, Click-Throughs, and Subscribers
Social media analytics give you the overall feel of how each of your platforms is interacting with the content. You may have the most engagement and leads coming from Facebook, but LinkedIn and Twitter aren’t producing anything worthy of the time you are putting into these sites. Also, think about the big picture when it comes to reading your data results. Maybe your numbers were down on Twitter because you were spending all of your efforts promoting on Facebook. Not every social media site is meant to be used for every business, so allocating your time appropriately is pertinent. Time wasted is money lost.
Ask yourself these questions:
- Are you reaching and engaging with your target audience?
- How many of your followers are inquiring about your products and services by clicking on your call to action?
- How many of them are subscribing?
There are so many key performance indicators (KPIs) available to analyze. Start with the most relevant topics. Below are our top three KPIs to keep track of.
1 | Engagement
Engagement is by far the most important metric you should be concerned with. Engagement measures the number of likes, shares, and comments on your social media posts receive. If you have a large reach with low engagement, that is a bad sign. It shows that you do not have a clear marketing message or that your content does not resonate with people who are interested in what you have to offer. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter depend on user engagement to allow your content to be filtered to other news feeds and to help grow your reach.
2 | Click-Throughs
Once your social media sites start to gain traction, it’s easy to get excited about how many likes, shares, and comments you are getting. Since your ROI is what matters; how many of your loyal fans are clicking on your call to action buttons and taking the next step to converting to a paying customer? Otherwise known as your click-through rate (CTR). Typically the main goal of Call to Actions is to have the user submit their email address in return for your offer. CTAs like “Learn More” for example, can redirect a user to your blog post that was just published. “Contact Us” is great for those with a strong interest in your business to find out more information, book an appointment, etc. Growing your email lists is your direct opportunity to get your message to each client on a more personable basis. Check out our blog “Email Marketing For Small Businesses” to learn more about this topic.
3 | Subscribers
Subscribers are the individuals who have a strong interest in following your content online. With their interest in the content that you are providing comes mores likes, comments and them sharing your content on their social media profiles acting as your very own brand ambassadors. These individuals are great people to survey to get an understanding of their pain points that relate to your business.
Growing your subscriber list is easy when you are providing relevant content that your followers can relate to. An easy place to start is telling your audience about the amazing content you provide in your newsletters every month. Active Campaign is a great application to integrate with your newsletter which also helps to target your ideal audience. Say you just finished another blog post. Share the link on social media with possibly a special offer to subscribe for an inside look behind the scenes. If you are adventurous and have implemented video into your content production, try growing a following on YouTube to gain an even larger community reach. Of course, there are always paid subscribers to support your cause. These are just a few ideas to get you started. What other ways have you tried to gain more subscribers to your content?
Resources to Help You Track Your Analytics
Understanding your user’s behavior on your social media platforms is vital to recognize which content pieces they have related to the best. The best way to determine this is by using a particular program for each platform. Some programs allow you to gather results for Facebook analytics, Instagram analytics, and Twitter analytics within one program.
- Facebook Insights: This is a free basic analytic program that is accessed through your Facebook Manager.
- Iconosquare: Is a paid app that provides Instagram analytics from your community of followers. This is a great app for analyzing hashtag data.
- Hootsuite Analytics: (Our choice for analytic reports) free app that focuses on tracking insights from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Great for those who already use Hootsuite to schedule their social media posts.
- Sprout Social: Is a paid application that can be used with all of the major social media platforms.
As always, do your research to determine which application works best for you and your business.
We hope you see the benefits of tracking your efforts in social media to increase your return on investment and raise your bottom line. Start using analytics today to track your time and efforts you have put into social media content creation to determine the best formula for your ultimate success online.